Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
May 21, 2008
Baseball Musings Radio Show

The Baseball Musings Radio Show comes your way via TPS Radio tonight at 8 PM. The show is on a new broadcast platform, UBroadcast.com. They do require you to download their player, but it's easy to install and they don't appear to push ads at you with it. TPS Radio is on channel 100. You'll be able to chat as always, so I hope you'll tune in.

As always, the show will be available as a podcast shortly after the broadcast finishes. If you have any topics you'd like to hear discussed, please leave a comment.


Posted by David Pinto at 01:44 PM | TrackBack (0)
Comments

I hope you bring up how some mlb.com subscribers are reacting to the new inclusion of some LoUd and obnoxious (a favorite description it seems) Yahoo ads during the innings on the life feeds.

http://www.mlbsupport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=197&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&sid=eb3374a38b37f331bc7e941815b43b98 for some reactions.

I agree with all the posters on the thread. I bought my subscription before the Yahoo/MLB.com announcement on April 10th this year and I sure as hell didn't expect un-affiliated ads to run between innings when I originally signed up.

I'd be really curious to know how Yahoo decided which ad to run (that plays every. single. break.) since I sure know *I'm* not in the demographic of the ad. It would be interesting to see if MLB.com or Yahoo bothered doing a customer survey to see who *is* in the demographic of subscribers because my intuition is telling me it's not the kind of people who 'appreciate' the kind of ad they've been playing.

As you can tell, this issue's really hit a nerve with me. It's a terrible conglomeration of intrusion of ads into a service I'm already paying for (and that I paid for *before* this change), the overall creeping commercialization into every nook and cranny of the internet, the growing trend this commercialization creates to try to box the consumer into demographics and zero in on them to the point of irritation and exclusion for the clients not in the demographic and the frustration of not being able to find a way out of this situation since mlb.com hasn't bothered to offer subscribers the option of forking over *more* money to get an ad-free service.

The web site itself is bad enough (too many geegaws, terrible linking, the whole things looks like crap if you're on a Mac) but at least the games were demographic-neutral and I could enjoy them purely for the game itself. Now I have to be bombarded by ads that are clearly aimed at males who are probably under the age of 35. I'm neither. And I don't know how this is suppose to entice a broader range of subscribers if the ads are meant to appeal to a very specific sub-group of the subscriber base.

I'm not near the market for my favorite team. The only way I can see or hear the games is to either wait for some to show up on TV or... well... that's the only way. I can't pick up the radio stations (and they're prohibited from streaming them online, anyway, since the MLB has those exclusive rights).

But I survived without MLB.com's service before I joined them last year and I can go back to what I was doing before I signed up.

Because if this isn't resolved by the end of the season, damned if they're going to get any more money out of me in the coming seasons until those ads are pulled.

Posted by: Stevie at May 21, 2008 02:54 PM
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